Open Source Decade: 10 years after the Free Software Summit

On the tenth anniversary of the Free Software Summit, the event where the term …

Paul Vixie and Marshall Kirk McKusick

Paul Vixie

Paul Vixie is the author of various RFCs and UNIX tools such as cron and BIND. He co-founded ISC (Internet Systems Consortium).

During these 10 years, a lot of things happened in the open-source world. What impressed you positively and negatively?

Paul Vixie: Positive: f/l/oss has become commercially respectable. Redhat and Novell, especially, have made deep inroads into the fortune 500 and have built an ecosystem on par with Microsoft's or, before that, with IBM's or Oracle's.

Negative: I've been disappointed in the continued growth of GPL licensing, since it means people don't really want to share, they want to control others. I'm using the BSD license since what I really want to do is share my code.

Is anything missing today in the open-source world?

Paul Vixie: Discipline and perspective. There are too many code forks, too much dilution and duplication of effort. For example, it is still not possible to write portable asynchronous libraries on unix, since everybody who needs a framework beyond posix just develops their own. Microsoft's portable functionality, and thus the number of integratable third party modules for Microsoft is far greater than Linux's, even though Linux has far, far more third-party software and far more functionality overall.

What are your expectations for the next 10 years?

Paul Vixie: I expect DRM in all its forms to die like an obsolete dinosaur and for significant consumer backlash against "lock-in" in all its forms. I hope this backlash will bring on its coattails some privacy awareness.

Consumers have been sheep-eating whatever Microsoft and Apple feed them, letting themselves be milked as a recurring revenue source based on habit and coolness factor and inertia rather than on competitive value. Noting that the current generation of teenagers is lost, I can hope that those who come of age in 2015 will be aware of all the tradeoffs they make of their freedom and privacy for bling and "in-ness", and that there'll be a nonviolent revolution. On that day, my original 1984 hopes for f/l/oss will finally be realized.

Marshall Kirk McKusick

During these 10 years, a lot of things happened in the open-source world. What impressed you positively and negatively?

Marshall Kirk McKusick: Positive: Open source is now legitimate in the corporate world. This in turn has lead to a lot more high-quality open source becoming available.

Negative: Some key pieces have become "success-disasters," notably Linux, which grew in size and popularity so quickly that it has had trouble assimilating all the changes in a coherent way.

Is anything missing today in the open-source world?

Marshall Kirk McKusick: There is still a lot of uncertainty about the GPL, especially the latest GPL version 3. Software patents are also creating a lot of uncertainty on the viability of open-source software. For example, if you build a highly successful product around a piece of open-source software, can some patent holder come sue you for some algorithm contained in the software base that you are using?

What are your expectations for the next 10 years?

Marshall Kirk McKusick: I expect the open-source desktop market to expand, but only modestly. I expect that there will be a major patent-based shakedown of a major player that will either result in patent reform or a pullback from open-source software.